A blog about translation, language, literature, and other related topics. Updated every approximately every five days.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

The Most Popular Languages on the Internet: Guest Post by Today Translations

For people who
run online businesses, knowing what the most popular languages on the internet
are, is extremely important. Sociologists can also benefit a lot from this, as
they can analyse how people’s thoughts and perspectives have changed in just
several years. Gathering accurate data
is not that easy, and it is only specialist language related services that have
access to it. Today Translations, a London based translation agency,
has looked at the data collected by Internet World Stats and has noticed that
Internet usage has grown nearly 500% in the last 11 years. This is absolutely
amazing.

Some of the data
that is available in this infographic is not just interesting, but also
surprising. For instance, although Japan represents just 10% of Asia’s internet
population, it has one of the highest rates of internet penetration – 78% (the
percentage of the population who uses the internet). Germany’s percentage is of
79, while that of Russia’s is of 43.

English remains
one of the most used languages on the Internet, followed by Chinese and
Spanish, while on Facebook, English is the first, and Spanish is the second.
Knowing this data is very useful for all those involved in social media
campaigns aimed at targeting traffic to certain businesses.

Perhaps one of
the most interesting details of this infographic is that Arabic has increased
in popularity a lot, as a direct consequence of the increased number of
internet users.

It is common
sense to recognise that in the very near future the data will change. Some of
the languages will rank higher in the hierarchy, making room for others, maybe
less common.

From the
perspective of the internet, no language is to be ignored. It can become the
language of a very successful business, that is why more specialised
translation services like software translation
and localisation will increase in popularity and demand.

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About Me

Originally from Chicago, I lived in southern Sweden for nearly 5.5 years, and moved to southern Wales in September 2006. I completed a Ph.D. translation studies in June 2009 at Swansea University, with a dissertation on the translation of children's literature.
Now I live in Norwich, England, where I am a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, and I also work as a translator, writer, and editor.
Contact me at bravenewwords (AT) gmail (DOT) com.